It takes us fifteen minutes to catch the distracted turkey and remove the feather. By that time I am, in every sense, too overheated to permit myself to talk to Manuel on the subject of cruelty to animals. Some time when I have just had a bath, put on a fresh suit of white clothes, and am feeling altogether cool and calm and kind, I shall tell him a few things. But to what end? If he had been willfully, deliberately cruel to the turkey there might be some hope of converting him—of bringing about a change of heart. But he wasn’t consciously cruel. Like most Mexicans he is fond of animals. In fact, there is in Mexico more emotion expended on pet animals than in any country I know. They make pets of their sheep and their pigs, and one frequently sees a child sitting in a doorway or by the roadside nursing a contented chicken. Yet in emotion it more often than not begins and ends. Their lack of real kindness, of consideration, of thought, in a word, is infuriating. Everyone on the ranch has dogs, and at times they are petted, played with, admired, and called by affectionate names—but they are never fed. I have seen a family go into ecstasies for hours at a time over six new-born puppies and then merely shrug and change the subject when it was suggested that they ought to feed the pitifully thin little mother. The national love of grace and beauty renders them sensitive to the beauty and grace of animals, but to their comforts, even their necessities, they are blind and therefore indifferent. They are all rather incapable of divided feelings. Manuel had not the slightest feeling of compassion for the turkey’s torture. The fact that he had prevented the bird from fighting was all sufficient and left no room in his intelligence for any other.
Rosalía heroically manages to cook and serve my luncheon, and as she drags herself in and out, the color of a faded lettuce leaf, with her rebozo over one eye, I almost feel sorry for her. But I steel my heart and make no comment either on her illness or her partial recovery. After luncheon I again take my intermittent pen in hand and immediately throw it down. There is a scurrying of bare feet on the piazza, and six of the carpenter’s sons gather about the door. They are all crying and, although it is no doubt physiologically impossible, they are all about ten years old. The carpenter has eight sons, but one is noticeably younger and the other is an infant in arms.
“What has happened?” I ask serenely; for I have grown to regard battle, murder, and sudden death as conventional forms of relaxation. Six, sobbing, simultaneous versions of the tragedy leave me ignorant.
“Now, one of you come in—you, Florenzio—and tell me about it. All the others go around to the kitchen and tell Doña Rosalía. Now then, Florenzio, be a man and stop crying. What is it?” I demand. Florenzio’s narrative has moments of coherence. His father (usually the best of fathers) went to the dance last night and came home drunk (he rarely drinks). This morning, as he felt so badly, he tried to “cure” himself (they always do) by drinking a little more. By ten o’clock he was all right, and then—and then, “he passed the cure!” (This, I think, is one of the most delightful phrases in the language.) After he had “passed the cure” he suddenly went crazy, smashed all the cooking utensils on the floor, and ended by seizing a stick of wood from the brasero and beating his wife to a pulp. Then tearing the baby from her breast he reeled with it into the jungle.
“All of which, my dear Florenzio,” I feel like saying, “is dramatic and fascinating—but where do I come in? I can’t undertake to pursue your estimable father into the jungle, and I have no desire to inspect the maternal pulp. Why have you come to me?” But, of course, I say nothing of the kind. Instead, I am sympathetic and aghast and, surrounded by six fluttering little carpenters, go over to their hut, exclaim at the broken pottery, condole with the pulp, moan about the evils of drink, declare that everything will come out satisfactorily in the end, and leave them tear-blotted but not without interest in the future.
What, however, was in my thoughts throughout the visit was not the immediate distress of this particular family, but the long distress which, it sometimes seems to me, is the life of all of them. The house was typical of the houses on my place—of the houses everywhere in this part of the country, and I groaned that it should be. A small inclosure of bamboo, fourteen feet by twelve perhaps, the steep, pointed roof covered with rough, hand-made shingles of a soft wood that soon rots and leaks. The bamboo, being no more than a lattice, affords but slight protection from a slanting rain and none whatever from the wind; the dirt floor, therefore, is damp everywhere, and near the walls muddy. At one end is a brasero—not the neat, tiled affair for charcoal, with holes on top and draughts in the side that one sees in towns, but a kind of box made of logs, raised from the ground on rough legs and filled with hard earth. A small fire of green wood smolders in the center of this, filling the room from time to time with blinding smoke, and around it (before the carpenter passed his cure) were three or four jars of coarse brown pottery, and a thin round platter of unglazed earthenware on which are baked the tortillas. Near by is a black stone with a slight concavity on its upper surface and a primitive rolling pin of the same substance resting upon it. On the floor in the corner are some frayed petates—thin mats woven of palm or rushes. This is all, and this is home. At night the family huddles together for warmth with nothing but the petates between them and the damp ground. They sleep in their clothes and try to cover themselves with their well-worn sarapes.
In a perpetually warm climate there is nothing deplorable about such habitations, but from November to March the tierra templada is not perpetually warm; it is for weeks at a time searchingly cold. The thermometer often goes down to forty (Fahrenheit), and forty with a mad, wet wind blowing through the house is agony to a person in cotton pajamas, trying to seek repose in a mud puddle. During a protracted norther the sadness of their faces, the languor of their movements—the silent, patient wretchedness of them is indescribably depressing. A week or so ago during a norther, when I was taking a walk between the end of one cloud burst and the beginning of the next, I stopped to pay my respects to a baby who had been born a few days before. The mother was vigorously kneading corn with her stone rolling pin and the baby, absolutely naked on a blanket, was having a chill.
“The poor little thing is very cold; it is shaking all over,” I remarked.
“Yes, it has had chills ever since it came,” the woman answered.
“But in weather like this you ought to cover it,” I insisted.